Loading PC Games from Reel to Reel Tape

Greetings, and today is one of those LGR things  where we don’t ask “why,” but instead ask  “why not.” Cuz we’re gonna be loading a PC  game from quarter-inch reel to reel audio tape,  simply for fun because we can. All we’ll need  is a tape recorder, some blank tape, a suitable  audio cable, and a computer capable of playing and  recording 8-bit PCM audio in mono at 22 kilohertz.  Now, obviously there’s no practical reason  to do this, and if you’re familiar with 1980s  

microcomputers then you already know they can load  programs from tape. Being a cheaper alternative  to floppy disks, dozens of classic computers  were designed to use audio cassette tapes as  their primary method of loading and saving data.  Even the original IBM PC had a cassette port,  so loading personal computer software from  cassette is nothing new. Or even vinyl, there have  been a number of flexi disc and other records  released containing KCS-encoded data in audio  form. But using reel to reel tape? Now that’s  even more exciting, being a costlier enthusiast  format that no home computer user would bother  wasting for data storage back in the day. 

Business  and government mainframes, sure, those often used  tape drives with reels housing half inch tape. But  the way those wrote data isn’t quite what we’re  doing today, despite some aesthetic similarities.  Instead we’re gonna be recording and retrieving  data using a variant of the Kansas City Standard.  Also known as Byte Standard, KCS was a  recording method designed for early personal  computers to store data on compact cassette  tapes, a standard first introduced in 1975.Speaking of 1975, that’s also when this  tape deck was made! 

This is a Tandberg 10XD,  which I’m using not only because it’s also from  1975, but also because it’s a machine that can  record to 10.5-inch reels at a transport speed  of 15 inches per second. So it looks great on  camera with those huge metal reels, and it’ll  sound great too, with 15 ips being way better  than the Kansas City Standard was ever intended to  use. For reference, typical cassette tapes have a  transport speed of just 1⅞ inches per second, so  having 15 ips at our disposal should be fantastic  for reliable data storage. On that note, the media  I’m using is a brand new 2500ft reel of Recording  the Masters SM911 quarter-inch tape. 

It’s a nice  1.97 mil, high output, low noise tape that sounds  excellent with music and sound recordings, so  it should be absolute overkill for storing data.  Just gotta string it through the tape path and  get it queued up here, and we’re pretty much ready  to go on the tape side of things. On the computer  side, I’m going with the LGR Megaluminum Monster,  which is a Windows 98 PC with a 1 gigahertz  Pentium III and 512 megs of RAM. And I’ve  got a couple of them installed here, but for this  project I’m using the Creative Sound Blaster AWE64  Gold. 

The RCA output plugs directly into the reel  to reel’s line in, and output of the reel to reel  goes to the line in on the sound card. With a  quick stop in the middle to plug in some speakers  so we can actually hear what we’re doing.  And by the way, magnetic weirdness is always  a concern with tape, but what’s going on here  is fine. Those little speakers are magnetically  shielded and I don’t have the reel to reel right  up against them or the monitor anyway, so yeah.  

The bigger concern is getting a clean audio  signal between the computer and the reel to reel,  and my biggest worry was that the AWE64’s line  in recording might be too noisy. The only way to  know for sure is to give it a test, so let’s hop  into a DOS prompt and run KCS08. This is a program  that handles Kansas City Standard cassette  recordings, where you can take any file and  encode it as audio, and also decode KCS audio and  convert it to data. Even though it was designed  for cassette tapes, there’s no reason it shouldn’t  work on reel to reel. Just as a quick test though,  I typed up a small document in MS-DOS Edit and  saved it as a TXT file. Then it’s onto KCS08,  with the command for encoding being “KCS -U -M -Y”. This makes a WAV file, ignores errors, and enables 1200 baud mode.

KCS normally encodes at  300 baud, or 300 bits per second, but that results  in recordings four times as long, so, screw  that. And yep, that’s it! We’ve now got a WAV  file that’s eleven seconds long storing our test  text file in audio form, which sounds like this.  This works  in a similar way to serial modems, where each binary bit of information is stored  using audio frequency shift keying, or AFSK.  Basically lots of 1s and 0s represented by really  short sine wave cycles in quick succession.  

And now we can play it back and record it to tape.  Cool Edit 96 is my audio program of choice here,  since I’ve used it for decades and I know it  does exactly what I need. You could just as  easily use a DOS audio program and do this whole  process on an even older computer if you wanted,  but I’ve got Windows 98 on here so why not.  Just gotta make sure it’s playing back as  loud as possible on the computer side, and not  completely blowing things out on the tape side.  

I’m also not using any noise  reduction, we’re simply going’ in raw.  After a couple of volume checks, it’s time to  record some data!

Sweet! We now have a file on tape, and getting it  back on the PC is as simple as re-recording our  recording with the same parameters KCS expects.  Which is an 8-bit WAV file in mono at 22kHz. This  version of Cool Edit isn’t set to display the  waveform as it’s recording, but once it’s done,  there we go! We’ve got a recording of a recorded  recording. Nice. Just gonna trim the file to  remove the sections without audio, save that,  go back to KCS, and now we can decode it back  to a text file. 

The command is about the same  but in reverse, going from WAV to TXT. Didn’t  get any decode errors, so that’s promising. And  would ya look at that? A text file saved in DOS,  recorded to tape, played back, and loaded back  in DOS again! The only bit of weirdness is this  random block at the beginning of the text  file, that wasn’t there before. I went back  and re-trimmed the recording and adjusted the  volume a bit to see if that made a difference,  but nope. Still got a random block of text at the  beginning of the file either way. 

I’m not sure  what that’s about, or what it means for storing  a whole program. Only one way to find out though,  so let’s go back, rewind to a good spot, and  record a full PC game on reel to reel tape!

So, my immediate choice for a game to record was  Doom. Because of course, who wouldn’t wanna load  Doom from a big ol’ 10-inch tape machine? Problem  is, encoding Doom to KCS results in a ridiculous  5 hour, 24 minute WAV file, even at the  faster 1200 baud. And that’s the two megabyte  compressed shareware version of Doom, not even  the full game, so both are outta the question.  

Even if we weren’t recording at 15 inches per  second and went all the way down to 3 ¾, that’d  still only get us around 133 minutes per direction  on our 2500ft reel. So we’ve gotta think smaller,  way smaller, in terms of game size. And because I  don’t wanna be here all week I’ve chosen to encode  Kingdom of Kroz by Apogee Software. For  one, it’s only 52.4 kilobytes, and for two,  the entire game is packed into a single  executable. I didn’t wanna record multiple  files or compress things into a ZIP if I could  help it, so this works nicely. And using the  same KCS settings as earlier, our 52K game has  resulted in an 8 minute, 12 second WAV file. Heh,  yeah. 53,707 bytes loading at 1200 bits per  second, watch gonna do? 

And for ease of use  I made some batch files to make the encoding  and decoding a one-click process under Windows  Explorer. And yeah, at this point it’s just the  same thing we did earlier, but 8 minutes longer  each way! Again, I really wasn’t sure how well  this would work since 8 minutes is plenty of  time for errors to crop up, either introduced on  the PC side of things or the reel to reel side.  I mean, Windows 98 PCs and Creative Sound Blasters  aren’t exactly known for their noise-free audio,  and the Tandberg 10XD may be in good shape but  it’s still 46 years old so you just never know.  

That being said, the recording process went just  fine so all that’s left to do now is to rewind it,  record it back to the PC, and see how it goes!  I adjusted the input volume beforehand this time  so the resulting WAV file was maxed out, making  it look even more similar to the original output  from KCS. Now for the decoding, which only  takes a couple seconds thankfully. And check it  out! 53,708 bytes decoded with 1 decode error. If  you’ll remember, the original Kroz file was 53,707  bytes, so we’ve picked up a stowaway somewhere  along the line. But whatever let’s run it anyway.  

-Oh my goodness.

Aha man, it worked! Despite the extra byte latched on somewhere, I can’t see anything wrong  with the game at all. I assume that there’s  something similar going on to the text file  we tested, where there’s just an additional  weird character tossed in there somewhere. And  like, I can’t imagine that’s a good thing right?  

But it certainly doesn’t seem to have affected  the game at all. It runs, plays, looks, and sounds  as it should. [chuckles] Fantastic stuff. PC  games on reel to reel tape, what in the world.  Granted, at this speed the maximum size we could  fit is only 230 kilobytes per direction, at least  at a tape speed of 15 ips. 

Now obviously you can  store more data at slower speeds and use longer  tapes, but it’d be supremely cumbersome, with more  room for error and truly ridiculous loading times.  And you could also use a terminal program  instead of KCS08 and load data more directly from  tape instead of converting recordings back and  forth. And there’s nothing stopping you from  doing all this on a modern system either, it’s  all just binary data moving over audio cables,  so as long as you’ve got some way to convert from  one to the other then hey, go wild. But that’s  starting to enter the areas of practicality and  halfway reasonable usage. And suffice it to say  but this video was by no means intended to show  anything practical or reasonable. 

This was simply  an LGR thing for a bit of fun, and one example of  something that can be done with old data storage  standards using equally old tape recorders. Making  PC game tapes is admittedly not why I got into  reel to reel equipment after all. It’s much more  about playing back hours of high quality analog  music on tape and experimenting with multitask  recording and all that stuff. So I’m gonna go  ahead and hook it back up to the main stereo now.  But I hope that you enjoyed seeing this bit of  computer silliness anyway. And perhaps give it a  try if you’ve got an old tape deck lying around,  reel to reel or otherwise. For the time  being, I can think of no better way to  end this than leaving you with a direct 15  ips reel to reel recording of canyon.mid.